Pakistan entered its fourth week of nationwide unrest on social media platform X on Saturday, with activists waging a legal battle to have it reinstated.
The platform, formerly known as Twitter, was taken down after jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s party called for protests against a government official’s admission of vote rigging in last month’s election.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party faced a sweeping crackdown ahead of the February 8 election, forced into opposition by a coalition of military-backed parties despite winning the most seats.
Journalists and academics have filed a lawsuit in the Sindh High Court in the major city of Karachi against the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) over the outage.
“X is a common commenting platform in Pakistan and if you block it, then you are taking away oxygen from public discourse which is illegal,” said their lawyer Abdul Moiz Jaferii.
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“The reason behind this (disruption) is not to stop people from talking, but to stop most people from listening.”
In a hearing on Thursday, the telecom authority sought more time to respond to the challenge.
The government has not commented on the outage.
AFP staff reported on Saturday that X remained unsettled in the capital Islamabad, as well as the major cities of Lahore and Karachi.
Access to X was sporadic, occasionally available for short cycles based on the ISP, forcing users into virtual private networks (VPNs), said Alp Toker of the NetBlocks monitor.
Censorship of the opposition
Mobile internet services were cut across the country on election day, with the interior ministry citing security reasons.
This was followed by a long delay in the release of voting results — prompting allegations of fraud.
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Khan’s opposition party had already faced heavy censorship in the weeks before the election, banned from television channels and holding rallies, forcing his campaign online.
But censorship followed.
Pakistani internet freedom monitor Bytes For All recorded four separate hours of social media outages in January — cutting off access to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube while Khan’s PTI was broadcast live to his supporters.
“It all started with the targeting of a political party’s online campaign during the pre-elections, however, after the elections it is more a test of all citizens and democratic institutions — especially the parliament and the judiciary. How will they respond and interpret X’s blocking?” the guard told AFP.
Amber Rahim Shamsi, one of the petitioners and director of the Center for Excellence in Journalism, said she believes the restrictions are an attempt by the state to check PTI’s success on social media.
“When the state does not have a credible counter-narrative, it uses coercive measures to control or manipulate information,” Shamsi said.
Source: AFP